Sugar costs more than HFCS solely because of sugar import tarrifs in the USA that prevent domestic sugar growers from having to compete with foreign imports.
So protectionism for the Florida Sugar Cane League (yes, it sounds like a bunch of supervillains, but it's a real thing, can't make it up!), combined with subsidies for corn, serve to create one of the most lambasted industrial food ingredients of the 20/1st century, and make your Coca Cola taste *foul*. Sounds distinctly un-American to me...
* Socialism ** (diversion of taxpayers money from one social group to another) ** Oh, but wait, it's OK, because it's from a larger poorer group to a smaller richer one. As you were. * Interfering with the blessed and glorious Free Market * Interfering with the taste of America's Favourite Beverage
Sugar costs more than HFCS. How much more? What would the end product cost be without that advantage?
The cost would be lower, in the end, without the sugar tariffs, because the only thing that makes HFCS competitive is the high price of domestic USA sugar.
The main reason processed food is cheaper than fresh is shelf-life. Fresh food has a dramatically much higher wastage. While the stories about Twinkies that survive decades are not entirely true, they serve to illustrate the point.
I started doing the 5/2 fasting thing... the first week or so is hell, because you get the cold sweats and jitters I associate with low blood sugar.
Then the enzyme pathways you've been neglecting like gluconeogenesis start to work properly again as they actually get some exercise, and you are able to go through a fast day without the cold sweats - you know you're not eating, but you don't have those same hunger pangs. And boy, does that first meal after you break your fast taste good.
I think our normal diet habits of having three squares a day and snacks in between has left us Westerners with rusted and dysfunctional metabolic machinery.
Potatoes have virtually no sugar, their carbs are in the form of starch. And celery has so little of any calorific nutrient in it that it's often considered that you actually burn more calories chewing it than you gain from digesting it. I would suggest that this kind of ignorance about the composition of even basic foodstuffs is part of what drives the trend to obesity.
sleep apnea (1 in 4 americans have it and most are healthy normal weight individuals have some form of it.
The figures are more like 4-5% (in middle-aged men, the most obese group in America), and yes it has been associated with conditions that make obesity worse. On the other hand, treating it with CPAP in conjunction with a weight loss program had no significant effect on weight loss... which is the number 1 most effective treatment for sleep apnea.
I agree, obesity is a disorder of a complex system, and therefore cannot be attributed to just one factor. But even so, the factors that a person can control remain the same - their diet and exercise habits. Focussing on the other factors is not productive when you cannot control them.
That's why you can have someone who's had their stomach stapled and can't eat more than a plate's worth of food a day get fat.
They don't get fat. They were fat in the first place, if they had their stomach stapled. I've seen people who worked industriously to overcome their stomach stapling surgery to fit in as many calories as possible ; making sure they consumed only the lowest-bulk, highest-calorie foodstuffs, and wonder why they didn't lose weight. I mean, they had the surgery, and that's a miracle golden ticket to weight loss, right???
Also note that fat isn't just made of food. The air you breath and the water you take in also adds to the chemical process.
Mhhmmm, but it's the same air and water pretty much everywhere. Unless you live in a cotton candy cloud next to the gravy pond, it's not a factor in determining your weight relative to the next guy.
The two overwhelming factors that govern weight are....
* Dietary habit. Not just how much you eat, but what. Because "what" has a serious impact on "how much" - like those stomach stapler guys, it's much easier to eat too many calories if you ingest it in the form of low-bulk, highly processed foods. Yes, if you choose your car based on whether it has a beverage holder which will take a Big Gulp, you're one of these people. You can eat huge plates of vegetables and not gain weight, because they are mostly composed of that water you're talking about, and you can make them tasty with herbs and spices and... canned tomatoes, makes any plate of veggies 100% more interesting. The other important habit is your shopping habit - just not buying those low-bulk calorie-dense foods and not having them around is very effective.
* Excercise habit. The simplest being to walk and not drive. This is why America is so far ahead in the fat stakes compared to Europe - many things are too far apart from each other to walk, in contrast to Europe which is a little more compressed. I visited Oregon and people looked at me funny because I annouced I was going to walk to places as far away as half a mile or so. Where do you have the least obesity? Places like New York, where everything is in practical walking distance. Once you get fat, it's like a trap - everything feels like too much effort to do, so you do less and less. Your knees end up too damaged to walk or gasp run.
All this is from experience (although I've not been what I'd call "fat" in a long time, I'll raise my hand to being overweight). My marriage ended last year, and feeling the need to make myself a little more attractive for the dating game, I dropped over 20 pounds in 6 months from cooking for myself instead of buying pre-made food, and getting off my butt and going for a run once or twice a week.
I completely get that people find this hard, because I do. For most people, weight is a psychological issue, beause as a species we're hardwired to get as much food as we can, so to maintain a proper diet we have to use our front brain instead of our lizard brain. But the excuses like "it's my metabolism" or "it's the water" do nothing to improve the condition, they're just the mental equivalent of more junk food - something that makes you feel better about the problem but gets in the way of resolving it. Hence the emphasis I place on the word "habit" - making decisions is tiring, but if it's just "what you do"... then not so much. Cooking decent healthy meals for my daughter twice a week (with enough for leftovers to keep me eating well the rest of the week), and hopping on the rower for a minimum of 10 minutes a day, is now "what I do".
We want to do everything we can to minimize light pollution. The LEDs can be dimmed or even turned off if no vehicles are on the road. We envision activating the LEDs 1/2 mile ahead and 1/4 mile behind a vehicle. If you were to see the adjacent lane lighting up, then you'd know an oncoming vehicle is 1/2 mile ahead.
In addition, I suspect that you could also key the roadside lighting into the same car detection circuits. And it would only be a matter of time before some bright spark suggested turning them off completely - after all, the road markings are already illuminated.
I've had pressed CDs fail - a long while ago now - with a kind of mottled effect that the word "bronzing" could describe. I get the sense they were pressed on a cheap process.
New CDs are more prone to physical damage - the data layer is right under the label laquer. Older ones sandwiched the data layer between multiple layers of plastic and I think it's these ones I've had fail.
While there are ways to make electronic voting more secure, the systems as a whole are too complex for one person to audit. The more fancy crypto you add, the fewer people understand the components. The fewer potential auditors you have, the cheaper it is to buy them off / lock them up for political crimes.
It's easy to audit a ballot box. Virtually everyone of average intelligence understands the technology.
3 - The Chinese probably do clone the American router operating systems - and just replace the secret keys in the backdoors with their own, blocking the way for American security agencies and opening it for their own in one fell swoop.
I heard the Chinese were just using the backdoors that the OEM puts in (possibly for the government) by simply replacing the secret keys in the firmware.
I heard rumours that the Chinese firms who clone routers were just replacing the secret keys in the backdoors with their own and shipping them as-is. That kind of thing got Phil Zimmerman in hot water.. why isn't Cisco in hot water?
I came in to post exactly this ; is he going to be like the guy who invented blue LEDs and sue to get some tiny fraction of reasonable compensation for his discovery?
The sheer amount of money that has been pissed away on upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is thoroughly, utterly, disgusting.
For a slightly more server-based example (because we're getting a jump ahead of the Win2k3 Server retirement) ; my infrastructure support team have spent 2 weeks trying (and alas, failing) to replace the Windows Indexing Service, which is no longer supported, for an web app that of course, requires search. The replacement is "Windows Search Server" (worlds worst name for something you'd want to find by using a search engine...) ; and the "Express" edition is a 700MB download, that installs MS SQL Server AND SharePoint, which then sit there hogging half the CPU and RAM on the server you installed it on. They tried for 2 weeks to get it configured and working. Even I couldn't figure it out.
So I've installed Nutch and Solr instead. They require far less in the way of resources and I got a working search server in around 2 hours. But I've still had to spend about a week of work on it, porting the search pages to send nice neat URL based queries and parse the XML return documents, rather than the horrible ADODB stuff it used before, mostly tuning the crawler and index weighting, etc.
The upside is that now I have a search platform I don't need to run on a Windows server. Given that the site is mostly static pages, I could farm the whole thing off to a Linux server with relatively little effort, I'd just have to port the search pages from VBScript to some other kind of sensible server-side language.
And this is just one example, involving one website and a couple of ASP pages written in VBScript. (Just configuring IIS on the newer versions of Windows is a complete culture shock - they changed almost everything about the GUI for the worse, and of course, there is no fallback to using config files.)
On the desktop it's been a nightmare, although we've also been shooting ourselves in the foot as much as possible. Every app we use (and we have a lot of apps) has had to be assessed for compatibility with Windows 7. Yes, this is overkill - MS really do backward compatibility very well. But corporate risk paranoia demands it. So we've had all the overhead of providing test laptops to people, provisioning them, configuring them, having people test their applications, etc. The cost per user is way, way, way above $100 a head - as a large organization, our licensing agreements covered upgrading to Windows 7 for no extra fees anyway. The cost has all been about the process (which as I say, was probably total overkill and should probably have just been done by phased migration of users to Windows 7).
On top of this (foot shooting time), ICT decided that the time was ripe to go into Full Lockdown Mode. While this is partly just corporate paranoia, you really have to blame extended experience with the gajillion or so security holes (many of them human) associated with Windows for that. Developing even simple shell scripts is a total nightmare because the whitelisting client they installed... prompts... you.. every.. time.. you.. change.. one.. character... and... try... to... run... the... new.... version... The firewall they've installed completely blocks almost everything useful the instant you leave the office network.
Honestly, I'd really very much prefer that people were running a desktop Linux distribution, and that we were running Linux on our servers. Most of the upgrade compatibility worries would have gone away. Most of the security worries would not be a concern, and we'd not have corporate paranoia-ware consuming at least half the resources of our computers.. We wouldn't be forced to port software to new dependencies just because MS decided to deprecate components. While backward-compatibility is Microsoft's thing, keeping obsolescent software around for as long as you need it is something that the FOSS community does better.
Mum has been running on Linux for as long as I can remember now ; she had to remind me that it was well before 2012 that I first installed Ubuntu for her. For her needs, it's ideal, and I don't have to worry about her getting horrible malware, or falling prey to the scammers who ring up and claim to be "from Windows Support" - you tell them you're running Linux and they hang up pretty quickly.
Whereas America has an average of 18 minutes of commercials per hour, whereas (the UK, at least) has an average of 12.
Also in the case of the UK, it's been a long while since we only had 4 channels on the dial. We've had 5 since 1997, we've had subscription satellite TV since 1990, we now have digital TV (in terrestrial radio broadcast, satellite, and cable formats).
Just the BBC, our "TV License" payee, has 9 television channels (most of them in HD), 10 national radio stations, a multitude of local stations, and the enormously popular BBC website, including the renowned BBC News.
The license is £145.50 or just under $250, per year.
Quite aside from the quality of the programming the BBC produces itself, the availability of a high quality, commercial-free national broadcaster forces all the commercial stations to raise their game - shorter commercials, better content (yes, including imports from other countries).
While in recent years I have had some doubts about the impartiality of their news coverage, I wouldn't be without the BBC. I've seen American broadcast television. I don't want us to go the same way.
Since the production of content is a fixed cost.. imagine the volume of quality content the USA could produce, given it has a population 5x the size of ours, if they had a similar license structure in place. Of course, the existing networks have imagined this, and quake in their boots....
I think the development of the law should be tracked using Git. Amendments are pull requests, and only permissible with a commit signed by the creator.
Instead of tacking amendments to the end of bills as they do now, just patch them directly - make the law simpler. And keep a full audit trail of the whole thing. No more sneaky little amendments by congressional aides like Mitch Glazier (search for "pisher" in the text..)
Our new whitelisting software slows down one of our export processes from 2 minutes to around 14, because it hashes all the files it reads and outputs and eats CPU doing it.
So it goes from something people will run multiple times an hour, to something that people will seriously think twice about doing. All the productivity gains of rewriting the software and taking some pains to make it multithreaded erased because it has got to the point where the IT department won't trust your computer to do anything other than what they sign off on. A guaranteed job for them maintaining the whitelist, everyone else's job slowed down.
If software patents were taken to their literal full extent, I'd lose my job anyway, because it's impossible to create any substantial piece of software without infringing multiple patents.
Developing new software would become so expensive - what with the cost of having a patent lawyer stand over your shoulder demanding explanations of everything you implemented, and the cost of licensing anything I infringed, or re-implementing things to infringe something else cheaper to license - that the market for my skills would shrink considerably.
Happily I live in a country that is so far in the grey area as to whether it recognises the validity of software patents, and I work for a government agency that has decided to license it's output with a BSD-style license (presumably so the corporate chums of the political bosses can make as much money as they'd like from our taxpayer-funded work...)
People who don't leave adequate braking distance and accelerate as hard as possible are the reason most of the traffic jams on my morning route occur. A single light touch on the brakes gets magnified into a ripple of progressively more urgent braking until you have traffic that grinds to a stop - no obstruction required. A few large gaps help to absorb this kind of thing and would keep the traffic flowing, but the few people who seem to think that tailgating people at beyond the speed limit until they give way and let the guy overtake you - so he can do the same thing to the next guy in the fast lane going the same speed - is acceptable make everyone else so paranoid that they are missing out on a particular piece of road that hardly anyone is willing to leave any space.
If everyone drove with a little more room, then the traffic wouldn't jam up so much, and paradoxically, people would get to their destination faster. The tailgaters are just spoiling their own driving party.
Slashdot Mirror
Sugar costs more than HFCS solely because of sugar import tarrifs in the USA that prevent domestic sugar growers from having to compete with foreign imports.
So protectionism for the Florida Sugar Cane League (yes, it sounds like a bunch of supervillains, but it's a real thing, can't make it up!), combined with subsidies for corn, serve to create one of the most lambasted industrial food ingredients of the 20/1st century, and make your Coca Cola taste *foul*. Sounds distinctly un-American to me...
* Socialism
** (diversion of taxpayers money from one social group to another)
** Oh, but wait, it's OK, because it's from a larger poorer group to a smaller richer one. As you were.
* Interfering with the blessed and glorious Free Market
* Interfering with the taste of America's Favourite Beverage
Sugar costs more than HFCS. How much more? What would the end product cost be without that advantage?
The cost would be lower, in the end, without the sugar tariffs, because the only thing that makes HFCS competitive is the high price of domestic USA sugar.
The main reason processed food is cheaper than fresh is shelf-life. Fresh food has a dramatically much higher wastage. While the stories about Twinkies that survive decades are not entirely true, they serve to illustrate the point.
Here's a thought... re-usable bottle... faucet.... just might work.
I started doing the 5/2 fasting thing... the first week or so is hell, because you get the cold sweats and jitters I associate with low blood sugar.
Then the enzyme pathways you've been neglecting like gluconeogenesis start to work properly again as they actually get some exercise, and you are able to go through a fast day without the cold sweats - you know you're not eating, but you don't have those same hunger pangs. And boy, does that first meal after you break your fast taste good.
I think our normal diet habits of having three squares a day and snacks in between has left us Westerners with rusted and dysfunctional metabolic machinery.
all sugar based products from potatoes to celery
Potatoes have virtually no sugar, their carbs are in the form of starch. And celery has so little of any calorific nutrient in it that it's often considered that you actually burn more calories chewing it than you gain from digesting it. I would suggest that this kind of ignorance about the composition of even basic foodstuffs is part of what drives the trend to obesity.
sleep apnea (1 in 4 americans have it and most are healthy normal weight individuals have some form of it.
The figures are more like 4-5% (in middle-aged men, the most obese group in America), and yes it has been associated with conditions that make obesity worse. On the other hand, treating it with CPAP in conjunction with a weight loss program had no significant effect on weight loss ... which is the number 1 most effective treatment for sleep apnea.
I agree, obesity is a disorder of a complex system, and therefore cannot be attributed to just one factor. But even so, the factors that a person can control remain the same - their diet and exercise habits. Focussing on the other factors is not productive when you cannot control them.
(non-Anonymous MD chips in)
That's why you can have someone who's had their stomach stapled and can't eat more than a plate's worth of food a day get fat.
They don't get fat. They were fat in the first place, if they had their stomach stapled. I've seen people who worked industriously to overcome their stomach stapling surgery to fit in as many calories as possible ; making sure they consumed only the lowest-bulk, highest-calorie foodstuffs, and wonder why they didn't lose weight. I mean, they had the surgery, and that's a miracle golden ticket to weight loss, right???
Also note that fat isn't just made of food. The air you breath and the water you take in also adds to the chemical process.
Mhhmmm, but it's the same air and water pretty much everywhere. Unless you live in a cotton candy cloud next to the gravy pond, it's not a factor in determining your weight relative to the next guy.
The two overwhelming factors that govern weight are....
* Dietary habit. Not just how much you eat, but what. Because "what" has a serious impact on "how much" - like those stomach stapler guys, it's much easier to eat too many calories if you ingest it in the form of low-bulk, highly processed foods. Yes, if you choose your car based on whether it has a beverage holder which will take a Big Gulp, you're one of these people. You can eat huge plates of vegetables and not gain weight, because they are mostly composed of that water you're talking about, and you can make them tasty with herbs and spices and ... canned tomatoes, makes any plate of veggies 100% more interesting. The other important habit is your shopping habit - just not buying those low-bulk calorie-dense foods and not having them around is very effective.
* Excercise habit. The simplest being to walk and not drive. This is why America is so far ahead in the fat stakes compared to Europe - many things are too far apart from each other to walk, in contrast to Europe which is a little more compressed. I visited Oregon and people looked at me funny because I annouced I was going to walk to places as far away as half a mile or so. Where do you have the least obesity? Places like New York, where everything is in practical walking distance. Once you get fat, it's like a trap - everything feels like too much effort to do, so you do less and less. Your knees end up too damaged to walk or gasp run.
All this is from experience (although I've not been what I'd call "fat" in a long time, I'll raise my hand to being overweight). My marriage ended last year, and feeling the need to make myself a little more attractive for the dating game, I dropped over 20 pounds in 6 months from cooking for myself instead of buying pre-made food, and getting off my butt and going for a run once or twice a week.
I completely get that people find this hard, because I do. For most people, weight is a psychological issue, beause as a species we're hardwired to get as much food as we can, so to maintain a proper diet we have to use our front brain instead of our lizard brain. But the excuses like "it's my metabolism" or "it's the water" do nothing to improve the condition, they're just the mental equivalent of more junk food - something that makes you feel better about the problem but gets in the way of resolving it. Hence the emphasis I place on the word "habit" - making decisions is tiring, but if it's just "what you do"... then not so much. Cooking decent healthy meals for my daughter twice a week (with enough for leftovers to keep me eating well the rest of the week), and hopping on the rower for a minimum of 10 minutes a day, is now "what I do".
I think the one accident it had during auto-drive was when someone rear-ended it at the traffic lights, which you can hardly blame on the autopilot.
The automated cars on the road right now are already safer than humans, statistically speaking, but the technology is too expensive.
History has taught us that technology gets smaller, better, and cheaper very quickly.
> Why mess with electronic voting?
Because it's much less heavy lifting to stuff the ballot box.
Won't the LEDs cause light pollution?
We want to do everything we can to minimize light pollution. The LEDs can be dimmed or even turned off if no vehicles are on the road. We envision activating the LEDs 1/2 mile ahead and 1/4 mile behind a vehicle. If you were to see the adjacent lane lighting up, then you'd know an oncoming vehicle is 1/2 mile ahead.
In addition, I suspect that you could also key the roadside lighting into the same car detection circuits. And it would only be a matter of time before some bright spark suggested turning them off completely - after all, the road markings are already illuminated.
Household gas is mostly methane or propane (for those without pipeline gas), and nowhere near enough pure for use in a fuel cell.
I've had pressed CDs fail - a long while ago now - with a kind of mottled effect that the word "bronzing" could describe. I get the sense they were pressed on a cheap process.
New CDs are more prone to physical damage - the data layer is right under the label laquer. Older ones sandwiched the data layer between multiple layers of plastic and I think it's these ones I've had fail.
Indeed.
While there are ways to make electronic voting more secure, the systems as a whole are too complex for one person to audit. The more fancy crypto you add, the fewer people understand the components. The fewer potential auditors you have, the cheaper it is to buy them off / lock them up for political crimes.
It's easy to audit a ballot box. Virtually everyone of average intelligence understands the technology.
3 - The Chinese probably do clone the American router operating systems - and just replace the secret keys in the backdoors with their own, blocking the way for American security agencies and opening it for their own in one fell swoop.
I heard the Chinese were just using the backdoors that the OEM puts in (possibly for the government) by simply replacing the secret keys in the firmware.
I heard rumours that the Chinese firms who clone routers were just replacing the secret keys in the backdoors with their own and shipping them as-is. That kind of thing got Phil Zimmerman in hot water.. why isn't Cisco in hot water?
In related news, the network efficiency at Chinese airbases has increased by 80% after they replaced the MCSEs with a very small shell script.
I came in to post exactly this ; is he going to be like the guy who invented blue LEDs and sue to get some tiny fraction of reasonable compensation for his discovery?
Even if it's a long month, you're going to have to talk out of your ass a bit too.
I so, so, wish it was a mere matter of $100
The sheer amount of money that has been pissed away on upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is thoroughly, utterly, disgusting.
For a slightly more server-based example (because we're getting a jump ahead of the Win2k3 Server retirement) ; my infrastructure support team have spent 2 weeks trying (and alas, failing) to replace the Windows Indexing Service, which is no longer supported, for an web app that of course, requires search. The replacement is "Windows Search Server" (worlds worst name for something you'd want to find by using a search engine...) ; and the "Express" edition is a 700MB download, that installs MS SQL Server AND SharePoint, which then sit there hogging half the CPU and RAM on the server you installed it on. They tried for 2 weeks to get it configured and working. Even I couldn't figure it out.
So I've installed Nutch and Solr instead. They require far less in the way of resources and I got a working search server in around 2 hours. But I've still had to spend about a week of work on it, porting the search pages to send nice neat URL based queries and parse the XML return documents, rather than the horrible ADODB stuff it used before, mostly tuning the crawler and index weighting, etc.
The upside is that now I have a search platform I don't need to run on a Windows server. Given that the site is mostly static pages, I could farm the whole thing off to a Linux server with relatively little effort, I'd just have to port the search pages from VBScript to some other kind of sensible server-side language.
And this is just one example, involving one website and a couple of ASP pages written in VBScript. (Just configuring IIS on the newer versions of Windows is a complete culture shock - they changed almost everything about the GUI for the worse, and of course, there is no fallback to using config files.)
On the desktop it's been a nightmare, although we've also been shooting ourselves in the foot as much as possible. Every app we use (and we have a lot of apps) has had to be assessed for compatibility with Windows 7. Yes, this is overkill - MS really do backward compatibility very well. But corporate risk paranoia demands it. So we've had all the overhead of providing test laptops to people, provisioning them, configuring them, having people test their applications, etc. The cost per user is way, way, way above $100 a head - as a large organization, our licensing agreements covered upgrading to Windows 7 for no extra fees anyway. The cost has all been about the process (which as I say, was probably total overkill and should probably have just been done by phased migration of users to Windows 7).
On top of this (foot shooting time), ICT decided that the time was ripe to go into Full Lockdown Mode. While this is partly just corporate paranoia, you really have to blame extended experience with the gajillion or so security holes (many of them human) associated with Windows for that. Developing even simple shell scripts is a total nightmare because the whitelisting client they installed ... prompts... you.. every.. time.. you.. change.. one.. character... and... try... to... run... the... new.... version... The firewall they've installed completely blocks almost everything useful the instant you leave the office network.
Honestly, I'd really very much prefer that people were running a desktop Linux distribution, and that we were running Linux on our servers. Most of the upgrade compatibility worries would have gone away. Most of the security worries would not be a concern, and we'd not have corporate paranoia-ware consuming at least half the resources of our computers.. We wouldn't be forced to port software to new dependencies just because MS decided to deprecate components. While backward-compatibility is Microsoft's thing, keeping obsolescent software around for as long as you need it is something that the FOSS community does better.
Mum has been running on Linux for as long as I can remember now ; she had to remind me that it was well before 2012 that I first installed Ubuntu for her. For her needs, it's ideal, and I don't have to worry about her getting horrible malware, or falling prey to the scammers who ring up and claim to be "from Windows Support" - you tell them you're running Linux and they hang up pretty quickly.
Whereas America has an average of 18 minutes of commercials per hour, whereas (the UK, at least) has an average of 12.
Also in the case of the UK, it's been a long while since we only had 4 channels on the dial. We've had 5 since 1997, we've had subscription satellite TV since 1990, we now have digital TV (in terrestrial radio broadcast, satellite, and cable formats).
Just the BBC, our "TV License" payee, has 9 television channels (most of them in HD), 10 national radio stations, a multitude of local stations, and the enormously popular BBC website, including the renowned BBC News.
The license is £145.50 or just under $250, per year.
Quite aside from the quality of the programming the BBC produces itself, the availability of a high quality, commercial-free national broadcaster forces all the commercial stations to raise their game - shorter commercials, better content (yes, including imports from other countries).
While in recent years I have had some doubts about the impartiality of their news coverage, I wouldn't be without the BBC. I've seen American broadcast television. I don't want us to go the same way.
Since the production of content is a fixed cost.. imagine the volume of quality content the USA could produce, given it has a population 5x the size of ours, if they had a similar license structure in place. Of course, the existing networks have imagined this, and quake in their boots....
I think the development of the law should be tracked using Git. Amendments are pull requests, and only permissible with a commit signed by the creator.
Instead of tacking amendments to the end of bills as they do now, just patch them directly - make the law simpler. And keep a full audit trail of the whole thing. No more sneaky little amendments by congressional aides like Mitch Glazier (search for "pisher" in the text..)
Our new whitelisting software slows down one of our export processes from 2 minutes to around 14, because it hashes all the files it reads and outputs and eats CPU doing it.
So it goes from something people will run multiple times an hour, to something that people will seriously think twice about doing. All the productivity gains of rewriting the software and taking some pains to make it multithreaded erased because it has got to the point where the IT department won't trust your computer to do anything other than what they sign off on. A guaranteed job for them maintaining the whitelist, everyone else's job slowed down.
If software patents were taken to their literal full extent, I'd lose my job anyway, because it's impossible to create any substantial piece of software without infringing multiple patents.
Developing new software would become so expensive - what with the cost of having a patent lawyer stand over your shoulder demanding explanations of everything you implemented, and the cost of licensing anything I infringed, or re-implementing things to infringe something else cheaper to license - that the market for my skills would shrink considerably.
Happily I live in a country that is so far in the grey area as to whether it recognises the validity of software patents, and I work for a government agency that has decided to license it's output with a BSD-style license (presumably so the corporate chums of the political bosses can make as much money as they'd like from our taxpayer-funded work...)
People who don't leave adequate braking distance and accelerate as hard as possible are the reason most of the traffic jams on my morning route occur. A single light touch on the brakes gets magnified into a ripple of progressively more urgent braking until you have traffic that grinds to a stop - no obstruction required. A few large gaps help to absorb this kind of thing and would keep the traffic flowing, but the few people who seem to think that tailgating people at beyond the speed limit until they give way and let the guy overtake you - so he can do the same thing to the next guy in the fast lane going the same speed - is acceptable make everyone else so paranoid that they are missing out on a particular piece of road that hardly anyone is willing to leave any space.
If everyone drove with a little more room, then the traffic wouldn't jam up so much, and paradoxically, people would get to their destination faster. The tailgaters are just spoiling their own driving party.